Waterford Institute of Technology

The site and its processes

Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) is a university-level institution in the South-East of Ireland with over 10,000 students and 1,000 staff. WE offer tuition and research programmes in various areas from Higher Certificate to Degree to PhD.

Our site is large with 15,000+ pages and around 250,000 visitors an month. It serves a large community, including prospective students, current students, staff, research, business, industry and many more. We have around 90 staff who regularly contribute to the site.

The current site is a redesign of our first Expression Engine powered site which launched in 2012.Proir to that we used another CMS widely used in higher education sites but found that it didn’t give us the flexibility that we required.

The new version of the site was launched on the 18th of December 2014. The main focus of the project was to convert the site over to a responsive layout and overhaul the complete design of the site. The project took a year to complete and was done in conjunction with Emagine Media an award winning web agency based in Waterford and part of the EE pro network. They were also involved in the original redesign in 2012 and introduced us to Expression Engine.
We have found the Expression Engine gives us the scalability and flexibility we need to manage and develop a site of this size. On a day to day basis the institute creates a large amount of content and with Expression Engine even an untechnical user can create effective content. We will continue to use it and roll it out to a number of other websites that are part of the institutes organisation.